Austin, TX - October 2017 - February 2018

The inaugural iteration of the collective was made up of musicians, professors, designers, printmakers, curators, performance artists, philosophers, hackers, poets, sculptors, comedians, puppeteers, tarot readers, and many more descriptors of our “whats”. Throughout the season, we met every Tuesday night to discuss readings in fashion studies. We had a different topic each night — broad subjects like intersectionality, performativity, gender, sexuality, race, technology, communication, appropriation, capitalism, art, etc.

An essential component of IMMEDIATE Fashion School is our engagement with scholars, artists and leaders outside our collective on topics relevant to our mission. For our first season we invited Dr. Jonathan Michael Square (Harvard University) and Kimberly M. Jenkins (Pratt Institute & Parsons School of Design) to present their daylong workshop “Fashion & Justice” to our community. We recruited local scholar Dr. Lyndon K. Gill of UT Austin to present as well. The agenda was packed with participatory lectures with titles like “Critical Ways of Seeing,” “A Guide to Conscious Consumption” and “Why Race and Representation Matters in Contemporary Fashion.”

In addition to our discussion, we held skill-share workshops and collaborative art-making sessions. We explored creating our own personal uniforms via weekend long sewing seminars where everyone created a jumpsuit or garment for themselves, spent a weekend learning an experimental garment cutting technique called subtraction cutting and another weekend exploring screen-printing and stenciling techniques.

Music in video by Annika Sparkles

Our experiments and improvisations culminated with the output of two collaborative art projects presented at an exhibition at The Museum of Human Achievement. One project was an interactive multi-person garment which took shape as a möbius merry-go-round suspended from the gallery ceiling. This eight person garment was built in the shape of a möbius, pointing to the idea that truth is too complex and contradictory for binary thinking.

Our other collaborative project was a class zine in which each member of the collective was invited to contribute written or visual material in response to our time together. In the end, our zine was a compilation of creative reflections that took the form of artwork, stories, photography, instructions for a clothing pattern, games, a recipe, a song, a research project and a satirical advice column.